


live a little (because there's a little worth living for)

by the merienes tranch (lilhalphys)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Beach Existentialism, F/M, Lance Makes Mistakes Okay, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Rewrite, Road Trips, Slow Burn, Trans Female Character, rating for profanity, trans girl keith, trans keith
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-13
Updated: 2017-10-13
Packaged: 2019-01-16 16:46:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12346635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilhalphys/pseuds/the%20merienes%20tranch
Summary: lance and co. go to the beach to slack off all summer and nobody argues with anybody else and lance meets the love of his life and its all so, so perfect.or. something like that. (nothing like that).(lance opens his eyes. theres a softness to it, like hes the protagonist waking up at the beginning of a poorly written romcom, only he wasnt really sleeping and he would never be in a (read: shitty) romcom)





	live a little (because there's a little worth living for)

**Author's Note:**

> this is a rewrite of something i was definitively not happy with before. you can find the original on my profile if you like

_ because my god, im tired of being perfect and i really just want to live _

 

in his mind’s eye, there are waves crashing against a porcelain coral shore, the gentle noise soothing, like the “rainmakers” from his elementary school music class. the sand beneath his feet is soft, the gentle kisses of a thousand mermaids against his soles. they linger, clinging to his sweaty skin as he sprints along the shore line, perfectly toeing the line between the water and the land it laps against. theres a figure off in the distance and she’s beautiful, and she needs him.

  
  
  


lance opens his eyes. theres a softness to it, like hes the protagonist waking up at the beginning of a poorly written romcom, only he wasnt really sleeping and he would never be in a (read: shitty) romcom. he groans, and the brown and grey striped walls that may have once been cutely blue and white groan back. the bed beneath him is hard, and he groans again, louder and longer this time. hes never slept on a bed with springs; no, his family loved him enough to never let him get used to that. he needs a comfortable bed, damn it!

 

when his continued groaning doesn’t get a response from the other people in the room, lance presses his elbows against the bed and stretches. the force of it all wakes up his sore legs and flushes out the ache of where metal death rods dug into his ribs. he still has no desire to bother himself with getting up, so he lets his elbows fail him and the springs find their little nooks in his back again. there’s a little ball of socks a little too big for him within arms reach, so he grabs it and throws it up at the popcorn ceiling.

 

“it’s asbestos, lance.” across the stuffy motel room, hunk sits on the floor. his back is to lance and his head is down, and lance knows hes moving his arms from the way his thin shirt shifts slightly against his body. probably looking at the pokemon cards he picked up at the last gas station theyd stopped at.

 

“readin’ my mind again, man?” the corners of lance’s mouth are conflicted; on one hand, he’s grateful for the attention, but, on the other, he’s was done with hunk’s cynicism halfway into the nine hour car ride. he never really picks a side, so the words come out a bit warped. he grabs the sock ball from where it had landed beside him and tosses it up at the ceiling again.

 

“you don’t really seem to put in the effort to make it hard.” its from the bathroom this time, pidge is fiddling with her glasses or something, lance never really bothered to ask. what? she looked pissed. her words are somewhat muffled by the closed door, but her sarcasm gets to lance loud and clear and stabs him like a rogue piece of metal. the sock ball hits the floor.

 

maybe his reaction is visible, or maybe its just coincidence, but when he looks over at hunk while sitting up to get the sock ball he’s looking back. lance dramatically clutches at his chest and pulls some of his shirt between his fingers. his eyes roll back into his head and he lolls hi tongue from his mouth. its a practiced motion as he flops onto the mattress, used on many a giggling niece or nephew, only then the beds were more comfortable. hunk doesn’t start laughing that he can hear until he shouts at the springs prodding into his spine. whatever it takes, he muses as the bathroom door creaks open.

 

pidge does not look happy, or maybe its the fact that she’s so far away, on the other side of the motel room with hunk directly between them. the distance doesn’t hide the lumps of tape on her glasses; there’s one right in the middle, connecting the two lenses, and another connecting the right arm to its lens, and - good god - did she have a piece taping the glasses to her head?

 

the inner charmer in lance preens. time to lighten the mood. “that was fast, baby genius.”

 

hunk whips around from looking at pidge to gaping at lance. he makes wild shushing gestures, like it would make the remark go away, the horror in the action only matched by that in his face. pidges eyes, which had been closed as she massaged the bridge of her nose opened to reveal slightly less burning rage than lance expected. “you’ve slept for the past two hours; how the  _ hell  _ would you know how long i was in there?!” theres a challenge in her argument; a tone ready to turn into the day’s seventh major argument.

 

lance decides the most mature thing to do would be to concede and shut down the fight before it starts, so, naturally, he instigates with a shrug. “was fast for me.”

 

if pidge weren’t tired and hunk hadn’t had the last caffeinated soda, lance is sure he’d be dead from the way pidge moves to lunge at him. she’s too exhausted to make it, and hunk stands, pressing a hand against her shoulder to stop her. its lance he glares at, however. “dude. not now.”

 

pidge relents in her efforts to push past hunk’s hand. all of her underwhelming rage is gone. she just looks tired, like she’s ready to go home less than twenty four hours in. “this was a bad idea, lance. we should’ve done something simpler.”

 

lance knows she’s right, but hes desperate to be staltwart and even more desperate to dance on the shoreline with the beautiful love of his life, so he completes his original goal of picking the sock ball up from the floor. it resists, caught up on a sticky stain he doesn’t think the lot of them have been in this room long enough to leave. “maybe, but think about it, pidge! old, run down arcades, really greasy fast food! youre into those things! plus, look look look - listen. i did some research on the way here-”

 

hunk huffs. “-because you didnt  _ drive _ -”

 

“-and i found out that in a couple weeks they’re gonna have like! a fair or some shit like that, right close by! we can all go once we’ve stopped being petty assholes,” he stops to grin a little bit, “and maybe have a little fun, yeah?”

he ends his ramblings with a flourish of his hands, his smile a bit more genuine, his arms out from his sides in something resembling a shrug, and his posture  less dead-man-with-shrapnel-lodged-in-his-back. pidge looks annoyed at her very best, and hunk’s face, tinted green, is bent with a particular grimace lance recognizes from the time their fourth grade class went down to the amusement park to do math and lance had pressured hunk into getting on the deadliest coaster in the park, with - let’s say “less than ideal” - results.

 

they’ve each clipped a weight to one of his wrist and his arms fall, pulling the rest of his rod-straight spine into a slump with them. “fine. we don’t have to. whatever.”

 

“wait - lance - im sorry”

 

but hes too late; lance prides on himself to his commitment, even if its to being petty. his arm twitches and he totally, absolutely doesn’t throw the sock ball at hunk. hunk catches it, though. hes so talented.

 

he never took his jacket off, and he decides shoes are overrated, socks are fine on their own and should be allowed to breath, thank you very much, so he just. walks out the door. they could’ve stopped him; hunk had the last caffeinated soda.

 

the motel door slams behind him and he slumps against. the cold night air is a shock to his senses, burning him because damn, the outside world creeping on the other side of his bedroom door is something he’ll need some time to get used to. its too cold for june, but maybe its the little chunks of gravel peeking through the threads of his socks and stabbing into his vulnerable feet like ice that doesn’t - ow, fuck - melt.

 

he jumps with a small shout when his balance shifts and a particularly nasty rock stabs into the sensitive arch of his foot because goddamnit, what  _ isn’t  _ stabbing him today, and, suddenly, he’s not leaning against the door anymore. the air is deadly quiet, like the universe is holding its breath to what he decides to do, like the ocean breeze is passing him over to find someone who didn’t just have a petty meltdown.

 

lance has three options

 

  1. turn around and go back inside the warm, gravel-free motel room. which - no, he’s better than that! he committed to walking out, so walk out he will do.
  2. lean against the door again. the cowards move. no, he will never go back; he is a shark, always moving forward and never being an indecisive little brat.
  3. go exploring. he chose to come to this shitty town, might as well find his way around it. sure, his feet might as well be bare for all the holes getting poked in his socks but, hey, at least he has his - he reaches his hand into his pocket to find the void of space with pocket lint for stars and, no, he doesn’t have his phone. shit.



 

hes halfway down the sidewalk when he decides that he doesn’t need it because screw them, its their own fault for driving him out when they inevitably need him.

 

____

 

pidge was right, it was a shitty decision. helps they were only freshmen when they made it.

 

it was a “hey, let’s take the summer after graduation off to dick around” and he said it quietly because he was a freshman and scared of teachers hearing. hunk was still too agreeable with whatever shitty idea lance had and pidge was too young from two skipped years of elementary school to realize how bad it was.

 

but hunk since got himself a spine full of cynicism and bitterness (“love you lance, but you were not a good influence on twelve year old me”) and pidge since got the wisdom and contacts to have proper hind and foresight to get herself out of the worst of it (“hey asshole, remember that time you shaved ten years off our lives when you locked us in the bathroom while you bleached your clothes? fuck you.”), so imagine their shock when lance texted them pictures of a run down beach town the summer before senior year and claimed it was the perfect location for their little planned excursion.

 

imagine lance’s greater shock when they  _ agreed _  - to this moment, walking past the abandoned fair ground with an ornate yet clearly aged sign with “COMING SOON” written out in honey text against sodalite blue paper, lance thinks they only came to fuck with him, as revenge for all the shit hes pulled. thats why the car ride was so miserable. totally.

 

it had started with pidge waking up late. oh, lance had accomated for that; he knows his friends, he’s not dumb, but he’s reasonable! waking up a full six hours late on the day of the car ride they’d all been planning for four goddamned years? very unreasonable! now it was the dead of night and cold when it should be the sunny afternoon where lance dances with his soulmate with their toes in the fucking water but  _ no _ ! its dark, its cold, and theres sharp rocks imbedded in his feet its pidges fault for waking up late.

 

it got worse quickly, as it always seems to for him. hunk’s cynical spine had a lot to say, just as bitter at and far more emotionally affected by the change in schedule. but again, lance isnt some miracle worker magician who can deal with sarcastic remarks for a whole nine hour car ride. thats why he didnt drive the whole time. too angry.

 

so he stole pidge’s headphones at a rest stop three and a half hours in and listened to her shitty music the whole rest of the way.

 

it was the pounding synth beats he couldn’t fucking stand for a second longer when they  _ had _  to stop.

 

in spite of their infamous rapport, pidge, too, had long since tired of hunk’s witty remarks and hunk of her particular brand of quiet anger. it started with a threat, so low a straight out of a horror movie it didnt sound like it was coming out of pidge.

 

“lance. give me the headphones.”

 

sure, it wasnt literally a threat, but lance is good enough with people to get subtext. he was busy deciding whether to go on a date with a sleeve of powdered donuts or a bag of chex mix when it happened so his shout harmonized with the skid of his sneakers on linoleum when he turned to find pidge and hunk breathing down his neck.

 

“jeez, guys, c’mon with that-”

 

“please, man, give her the music.”

 

lances hands came up to his neck, instinctively protective of his prize, his beloved  _ child _ , “hey, but-”

 

“lance, its her turn.”

 

and there’s the bitterness, again, in all of them and originating somewhere that lance couldn’t pinpoint. “fine.”

 

he turned on his heel, clutching the bag of chex mix and one hand, and, with the other he ripped the headphones from his neck and threw them over his shoulder.

 

a crack resounded through the store, sending lance reeling back a decade to watching law and order with his older siblings, followed by pidges shriek and hunk’s responding louder, longer, bloodcurdling scream.

 

lance didn’t see her fall, but he saw her on the floor, clutching where the rogue headset had nearly broken her nose, pieces of her glasses - her  _ beloved brother’s glasses _  - strewn about the floor beside her. the blood followed soon after, bringing another patented hunk scream with it.

 

they bought the chex mix and paid the cashier extra for cleaning up the blood and not calling the police. when they got outside, pidge ripped the back of chex mix from lances hand, opened it, and replaced the contents with the pieces of her glasses.

 

but he kept the headphones, so they both had to deal with him complaining about being hungry until they got to the motel.

 

-

 

lance knows it wasn’t his fault, they way it happened. if pidge was a bit shorter, if his aim was a bit worse, it never would’ve. not all of it.

  
  


besides, the night is pretty, if inconvenient. theres no light pollution, nothing to stop him from looking up at the stars he cant name as well as hunk or understand as well as pidge. he looks down to get the icy chunks of death gravel from his socks and notices that, holy shit, he’s on the boardwalk and,  _ holy shit _ , the sand, the beach of his dreams is right there so fuck it. he takes off running, submerges his toes in sand and feels it cling to his socks like a desperate lover and hell never be able to wear these again, but the ocean breeze has finally chosen him and he doesn’t care.

 

its a moment of pure bliss, a moment of being a child with his family without care or responsibility, being an adult with someone to hold onto and he whoops into the sky.

 

he finds himself halfway down the shoreline and halfway to paradise when he’s not alone anymore. there’s another so-late-its-early beachgoer, a few yards up and a few feet into the water.

 

theyre sitting with their knees pulled up to their chest, the water halfway to lapping over their legs. their posture is as perfect as it can be for such a pose, rod straight save for their head tilted slightly back towards the sky. as lance approaches, he sees the darkness of the hair that bunches slightly at the back of their neck, how the front is dyed silver by starlight.

 

he approaches, because hes lance and approaching is one of his many talents. it takes everything in his power to not wince as he feels the water seep into his socks, and he remembers with a vigor that water is, in fact, liquid ice. he considers his pants but then considers his moonlit beach dreams and sucks it up, settling down into the water beside the stranger.

 

“hey!”

 

its almost funny when the stranger flinches with their actual full body, floundering for a moment before shooting up out of the water with a splash that doesn’t really  _ soak  _ lance but it might as well have because not only is his beloved jacket wet but goddamn, he was just trying to be social and look where it got him!

 

“sorry, you - you startled me.”

 

and they look actually guilty, and there’s water everywhere so lances voice isnt nearly as dry as he wants - “yeah. i noticed.”

 

“what are you doing here?”

“wow - okay! just gonna cut to it, huh? well, im not from around here-”

 

they glare. “i figured that out. ive never seen you before. i mean here - at the beach at three am or whatever.”

 

lance is tired of looking at their boots that are three sizes too small so he stands and looks them dead in the eye. “again: wow! okay! its not like ive wanted to come to this very beach for literal years or anything - oh wait, that's exactly the case!”

 

they scoff, but their glare softens. “this beach? of all the beaches in the world? what the hell does this place mean to you?”

 

and lance knows all he has to do is wait a moment to come up with a coherent answ- “what are you doing here?”

 

and the stranger pauses. their eyes widen and shine like sugarglass, but not sweet, but salty and its not from the seawater. they take a pause, and lance is halfway to apologizing when they sit back down in the water, facing away from the shoreline and looking at something, for something slightly beyond the moon.

 

“youre just passing through, right? not gonna be here for long?”

 

“where are you going with -”

 

“ill tell you, but only if you promise to not hold it against me.”

 

and agreeing would be a terrible idea, a final horrendous choice after a day, after two years of horrendous choices because he doesn’t know what that means and hes walked himself into a corner. “okay. i promise.”

 

“im here because i have nowhere else to go. every month, he - he tells me im gonna have to leave soon. that i cant be a little kid anymore. hes too nice to just tell me to go but its  _ coming _  and i dont know what to do when it does.” their fists clench in the water, gripping nothing.  “ive been fu - screwed by the education system and by the foster system and by every single goddamned person ive ever met! theres no place for me but here and i-” they stop for a breath, guilt stained like starlight on their face. little ripples float out from where they’d slammed their hands through the surface of the water.

 

lance is dumbfounded.

 

“its - at least its pretty out here. and quiet.”

 

“sorry”

“wh - oh god! no, you’re fine the quiet isnt-”

 

“no, im sorry because im going to have to break my promise already.”

 

and they balk, and lance has somehow pushed through the walls of the corner he’d walked into and found himself an even deeper corner.

 

“this,” he makes a wide gesture with his arm from the horizon to the boardwalk behind him, “is an amazing little town you have here. shame to let it all go to waste by only seeing whats quiet. im gonna show you this goddamned town so hard, you wont be able to thank me because that's just how much town youre gonna see. but itll be okay, ill understand, im an understanding guy.”

 

“ive lived here for half my life. ive seen this town.”

 

“have you?” and lance only chances it because, quite frankly, he needs to take these socks off and, okay, he maybe feels a little bit bad for the kid.

 

for a moment, hes got two heads, and then hes confusing, and then the stranger-not-stranger’s face takes a look that lance recognizes as a look of “fuck it” because he wore it himself one fateful night in freshman year.

 

they stand up and look him in the eye kind of awkwardly. “keith.”

 

he must look dumbfounded, because they clarify, “thats my name. you said yours was lance and-” as they awkwardly break eye contact they happen to look down and “-and you...aren’t wearing shoes? aren’t you cold?”

 

he kinda laughs, kinda scoffs. “its fine. i barely noticed."

**Author's Note:**

> i know keith and lance dont talk much here, but this chapter was mostly to set up exposition and lances perspective. thanks for reading!
> 
> if youve read this far and enjoyed it, please kudos
> 
> if you have something to say, please comment


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